Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with lisp

Help me learn Perl, Python, Lisp, Haskell, Ruby

jgunsch — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:39:29 -0800

Help me learn a few new programming languages. Python, Perl, Lisp, Haskell, Ruby. In college now, been programming for six or seven years already, all self-taught. I started with Java for a couple years, moved on and now consider myself fairly fluent in PHP and its friends (JavaScript, CSS, etc.). I've been having a lot of fun with jQuery lately! And now I'm stuck in a summer internship working on an ASP.NET project written in VB.

I'd love people's recommendations for books/resources to get started in a few high-level languages: Perl, Python, Lisp, and possibly Haskell or Ruby. I went through an O'Reilly book on Perl (I believe it was this one a couple months ago, so I have a handle on the syntax, but am not terribly capable with it.

Opinions/information on which languages people would recommend (or others) and for what purposes would be incredibly helpful. Other language suggestions are welcome, as well. I don't really have reasons to learn these specific languages beyond "well, I probably should know enough Python to know what it's good for, understand what's going on in Python code if I saw it, and hack something together for a basic task." I'm perfectly capable of searching for tutorials/books on my own, but people's personal recommendations have that knack of knowing which ones worked and didn't for them. ;)

Books/Internet resources/etc. that anyone could point me to would be awesome. Bonus points for a good crash course in Linux shell scripting.

Elegant weapons, for a more civilized age

ghost of a past number — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 02:35:07 -0800

Do lisp and dialects make sense for general purpose scientific computing? I'm thinking of learning some variant of lisp as my next language, mostly out of masochism. My real-world computing needs are scientific/numerical, i.e. data manipulation, some statistics, lots of curve fitting and the like, with some data acquisition thrown in . So far I have been using C for the heavy stuff, perl for the quick and dirty and FORTRAN when I have to (I hang around with engineers).

Is lisp any use for such things? All the functional recursiveness seems pretty nifty, but I'd like to pick up a tool I can actually use.

Help me, I'm a late adopter.

Zarkonnen — Wed, 14 May 2008 03:26:43 -0800

How do I learn new programming languages and start using modern web apps without getting frustrated and angry? So I'm in my mid-twenties and work in IT. I've been watching the last couple of years of exploding creativity on the net - literally millions of blogs, new programming languages, new ideas like twitter, citizen journalism, etcetera.

But lately I've realised that despite being able to see the potential benefits and really actually exciting possibilities of all this new stuff, I grumpily dismiss it and stick to how I've been doing things for the past couple of years. I use email, Java and PHP, and HTML 4.0.1 Transitional. I occasionally write some stuff in my site's news section, but I doubt my completely random ramblings make anyone come back. I'd like to think that I might have some interesting things to say on some topics, but I can't find the time to write about it, and it feels odd to intersperse "here's some photos I took" with "here's a detailed analysis of this political situation". I don't use Ruby Twitter XML Python LISP Quicksilver GTD Podcasts RSS Lifehacks. I don't contribute to wikis, or talk on forums (with the pretty much sole exception of MeFi).

At the same time I'm getting very frustrated with the limits of the tools I do know how to use - Java's verbosity and lack of support for first-class functions is a pain, and I don't like the fact that I'm always the last to hear about everything interesting that happens on the net. I have no coherent systems for making notes or keeping track of appointments or tasks, despite the plethora of Mac programs available for doing just that.

Why is this a problem? Well, I'm not even thirty yet, but I can already feel myself falling behind the times. I don't want to end up as the kind of programmer / person in general who toils away on some legacy project in a little corner, insisting "we've always done it this way" until one day I get fired for being completely superfluous. I want to want to learn new things. I want to be more organised.

So is there a question in all of this? Yes! I want you to tell me how to break out of my rut. Tell me how I can learn about, and start to use, new stuff, despite the two big obstacles I'm about to describe.

Obstacle number one: Why do I dislike new things? To a large part, to be honest, because the people who do use these things and try to promote them really grate on my nerves. Take programming languages: many advocates of new languages (Ruby, I'm looking at you) start off their pitch by pointing out how useless language X (also known as "Java") is, and how using their language allows you to become a massively more enlightened individual. Along the way, there is a strong implication that anyone who still uses language X in 2008 is a hopeless dinosaur. Way to insult your audience.

Number two: I find learning new things really unpleasant. Faced with needing to code a small website, another programmer would say "Cool, a chance to try out this new Python framework, and this AJAX front-end library - no one's ever tried using them together before, but I have a really clever plan involving metaclasses". I say "Well, I don't really want to take too much time on it, so let's code it up in imperative-style PHP 4. It's clunky, it's incredibly verbose, the code is hideous, and errors are hard to track down, but I know how it works and can liberally reuse code from previous projects." Of course, this is a caricature, but the point remains that that other programmer will end up being more productive and motivated than me, perhaps not on this project, but on the next, where I'm still using PHP 4, but the other guy would be using said Python framework (but not the AJAX library, because it turned out to be too buggy).

So why don't I go off and do like the other programmer? Because the framework and the library will have terrible, hard-to-find inconsistent documentatio, bugs that cause the default configuration to fail silently, and creators who have the attitude described in obstacle #1. And here's the crux of the matter: where the other programmer would think "Cool, a challenge! Let's try to get this working." I fly into an impotent rage, cursing the code, its creator, and myself. I will yell at the computer when yet another promising documentation link 404s on me, I will make strangling motions at the screen when it turns out that I installed some package whose name has no vowels on the wrong path, and I will mentally tally every single problem I've had getting the whole thing working. Both the other programmer and I will take about five hours to get the framework up and running, but while that's five hours of joyful problem-solving time for the other guy/gal, it's five hours of fuming at the computer for me, and I'll have a headache at the end. And somewhere along the way I will probably give up and code the thing in PHP 4 or Java, feeling guilty for being a dinosaur.

Much the same happens when the Thing in question isn't a programming language but a website or some organizer/productivity program.

So to the end of not having to look at new things anymore, I now come up with automatic put-downs for every new thing that crosses my path: Ruby's syntax is horrible, Twitter is shallow, XML is verbose, Python is white-space-sensitive, LISP is unreadable, Quicksilver is unstable and obtuse, GTD is for obsessive-compulsives, podcasts are narcissistic, RSS is inefficent and ill-defined and life hacks are impractical. Contributing to wikis is pointless, and all forums are full of 13 year olds.

Still, I want to learn and use new things, because I find them fascinating and recognise their potential. So what techniques, states of mind, resources would you suggest that I could use to approach learning new languages, starting to use new websites, new modes of communication, etcetera, without just coming away pissed off and exhausted?

(And if you've read all of this, congratulations. You get a voucher for small prize, redeemable anywhere on the moon only.)

Helping an ESL student with a lisp

msbrauer — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 06:07:35 -0800

How best can a teacher address an ESL student's lisp or other speech impediments? My girlfriend is teaching English in China and a couple of her students have lisps that make their spoken English extremely difficult to understand. While she does have training as a teacher of english as a foreign language, she has no training in dealing with speech impediments. The program at her university, similarly, has no real structure for dealing with this kind of problem. She'd like to help these students with their pronunciation, but has no idea where to start. The problem isn't limited to the students' English; the lisp is there when they speak Chinese. What sort of exercises can she give these students to help overcome their severe pronunciation problems? Is it even possible? If you had a lisp, is there something in particular that helped you with better pronunciation?

Customizing the size of the tex-shell window

gleuschk — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:31:16 -0800

I want to make a very small but critical change in the way emacs behaves in latex-mode. Can I force the tex-shell window to be a different size than half the current window? When I'm editing a *.tex file, I hit C-c C-f to typeset it. The first result of this is that the window splits vertically into two equal windows, of which the top is the *.tex file and the bottom is the tex-shell buffer. Then various typesetting stuff happens (which I don't care about at the moment). What I'd like is for the new tex-shell window to be only about 5 lines tall, rather than taking up half of the current window. I found the emacs manual section about splitting windows, which indicates that 'split-window' accepts optional arguments for the size of the new window, but I can't figure out how to change the way 'C-c C-f' calls the split-window command.

Jamie Oliver'th Lithp

zardoz — Thu, 11 May 2006 01:14:27 -0800

Help me identify this physical characteristic. What would you call what Jamie Oliver has? A lisp? In my mind a lisp is more pronunced, you can hear the "s" in a word changed to a "th", which kids often do but I think is rare among adults. Oliver doesn't really do this, and if you heard him speak and didn't see his mouth, you wouldn't notice anything unusual. But he (and a couple of my friends) have a sort of protruding toungue when he talks. Is there a name for this? Is it a lisp?

Lisp dialects

profwhat — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 11:05:11 -0800

What dialect of Lisp should I learn? My criteria are: Favoring widely-used versions; favoring versions with free compilers available for Linux; favoring versions with helpful tutorials and documentation; disfavoring versions that include lots of non-functional programming extensions. Speed and memory efficiency are not priorities. This is for academic interest only, not to make myself more employable, and not because I intend to write any useful code in Lisp. I have worked in several other languages already; all the major (and some minor) imperative languages, plus Haskell, which is so far my sole functional language.